Stress... what´s that?

Oh, but yes, I am in fact stressed by the amount of crap I have to do in the next 48 hours. Just so you can share in my distress...

1. Laundry. Easy, right? Wrong. We are currently experiencing a no water situation, and I have got to get my clothes washed by tonight or tomorrow at the latest if they are to dry in time for me to pack. And that´s assuming it doesn´t rain...
2. Pack. Easy, right? See laundry situation.
3. Plan for 2 more days worth of English class. Which, by the way, I am loving. Thank goodness.
4. Say goodbye to friends and host family. Goodbyes are awkward.
5. Plan my travels for the next 3 weeks. Or at least, for this coming weekend. It´s looking like the new volunteer Caroline will be travelling with me to Isla de Ometepe this weekend, after which we will probably go our separate ways. It will be nice to have a travel buddy to start out with, but this means we actually have to plan something so everything doesn´t fall through.

Oh, and I need to get home soon to watch the funeral procession go past my house. 2 (important) locals have died within the past week, which means the neighbors come out in droves to go to the funeral and watch the processions. There are also trucks with speakers mounted on them driving through the streets at literally all hours, announcing who has died and the time and place of their funeral. I hope I receive the same recognition when I pass. If anyone wants to loudly announce my death through their PA system at 4 a.m., I wouldn´t be opposed.

I am excited to start travelling, but I almost don´t want to leave at this point. I´ve really started enjoying my work, and my host family, and the city in general. It´s going to be bittersweet to leave for sure. Apparently on Sunday when I was wandering the city with my "cousin" some other "cousins" came over to see if I wanted to join their dance party in the other house. Even small invitations like that mean so much to me, and recently I have been noticing how blessed I´ve been with kind people here. Like I have said before, Granada is small enough that there don´t really seem to be any secrets or strangers after awhile. I see people I know everywhere and I recognize a lot of locals around town. My extended host family, fellow volunteers and Nica employees, kids from the school and daycare, as well as "schizo painter guy", "crazy eye mango lady", "drag queens", "guy with 1 leg", "guy who owns the pool hall", "old man who always says hi", "the guard at the rich people´s house", "that guy who delivers tortillas" and probably a half dozen others have formed my experiences here much more than anything I have done.

Enough reminiscing. I have a funeral procession to get to and clothing to wash.

"It´s like a giant game of red rover"

Last night, all I wanted to do was curl up at my house after dinner, listen to the rain and enjoy a quiet evening. Fortunately, Isabel Cristina convinced me to go out with the other US girls, which led to...

A series of highly ridiculous events. We started the night at this wine place right on the central park. The other girls apparently really miss "good" cheese, and this is the only place in town they´ve found that will serve a cheese plate. I´m ambivalent about the whole cheese situation. While we were enjoying our wine and brie, we noticed a marching band headed out way. That´s totally not unusual here since there are high school marching bands practicing at all hours of the day and night in all parts of the city. What we quickly realized was unusual about this band was that they were accompanied by dancers and all the musicians were covered in glitter. They ended up stopping at a stage about 2 blocks from us, so we walked over afterwards to see what was going on. It turns out this is just the beginning of a month long rev-up for the big carnival in August. Each city in Nicaragua celebrates their saint with huge parties. August 1-10 the party starts in Managua then moves this way, arriving in Granada on August 15, at which point the parades, bull running, drinking and dancing go strong for a few days and nights. But, of course, the high school bands have to start practicing now, and Miss Granada has to be crowned early.

We clearly didn´t fit in there since we were significantly older and more foreign than most of the crowd, but that didn´t stop us from somehow becoming part of the human barricade. The Nicas told us to interlock fingers and to not, under any circumstances, allow anyone from the crowd to break through and disturb the performers (hence the "giant game of red rover" comment). We all held hands and eventually the 5 of us got separated as more and more people pushed through. Imagine the pushiest crowd you´ve ever experienced, and then double the noise and the force. Eventually the Nicas decided we weren´t worthy of their barricade and we were literally carried away from the frontlines by the crowd. We ended up standing around and watching the band and dancers perform for awhile, then escaped to a nearby restaurant until the parade had moved on. We ended the night at a bar called Mi Tierra, where we were (pleasantly) the only foreigners and by far the worst dancers in the place.

Needless to say, we laughed a lot last night.

Today we were without both power and water for the morning. What do you do when there´s no power or water? Generally, you sit around your house and complain about how hot it is. You then go to your cousin´s house and complain about how bored and hot you are. Afterwards, you might go for a walk around town and buy some ice cream to console your sweating body. When you pass a house and notice their tv is on, you go home in hopes that the power has returned to your block as well. But don´t count on it.

She ate what?

Chicharrón. I ate chicharrón. For those of you who have never been to Nicaragua, chicharrón is fried pork rinds. With a little hair still attached for flavor. I´ll start from the beginning...

Remember my friend Fatima from the convent who invited me to her house? Well, I didn´t see her on Friday so I wasn´t sure if I was still invited or not. But after thinking it over, because I always think things over, I decided it would be better for me to go and stand on the side of the road where she told me to stand and have her not show up than for her to wait for me and me not show up. Does that make sense? This morning I left my house at around 8 to catch a bus from Granada to Nandaime. I then asked the driver to let me off at Empalme el Guanacaste which, incidentally, is the entrance to the volcano I climbed with Lesbia last month. So it turns out Fatima lives on the road leading up to the volcano. I remember passing all those houses and wondering what they were like inside... I waited at the gate for about half an hour, during which time all the taxi drivers who were waiting to take passengers up to the volcano entrance kept asking me things like "So, who exactly are you going to visit? You don´t know her last name? Or her phone number? Or her father´s name? Or where she lives? Hmm..." Eventually Fatima did in fact meet me and took me to her house where I met her mother, some neighbors, Fatima´s 3 sisters, 2 of her 4 brothers, her grandfather, her uncle and a few other people I couldn´t quite place.

I´m not a farming expert, but I could tell that subsistence farming in Nicaragua is far different from any kind of farming I´ve ever seen in the States. Necessity replaces aesthetics for sure. Fatima and her family all sleep in one building. I say building, not house, because house would paint a picture in your mind that´s not at all accurate. The kitchen is a separate building and they cook over 2 fires, one indoor and one outdoor. It´s on this fire that her mom fried up the pork rinds, some bits of pork and plantains. Actually, it all tasted really good. Fatima also chopped up a head of cabbage with a machete and threw in some tomatoes, some salt and some lime juice to go on top of the chicharrón. I "helped" chop cabbage but it´s harder than it looks to slice with a machete. They also grow rice and beans on the farm not to sell but for them to eat, and have a few goats and a herd of cows. It was a nice morning overall. Fatima, her sisters and I were the only ones who ate but it was a lot of fun sitting on the porch of their kitchen, drinking Pepsi and talking about things like what music we like (they asked me to translate the Black Eyed Peas into Spanish) and how hard it is to learn other languages.

After lunch, the girls took me to the bus stop and said goodbye. I ended up going to Masaya instead of Granada so I could visit the market one more time before I leave next week. The bus stopped in a completely different part than I´d seen before but I made it just fine. This day has been one endless example of the way things seem to work here: nothing goes the way you plan and everything´s confused, but in the end you get where you need to be. Unless you don´t, and then you´re in a new place. Last night at dinner my friend Trista said she doesn´t like South America because she feels like it might implode at any minute. I think that´s why I love it. It may and in fact often does implode in multiple senses, but at least that keeps things interesting.

There are no secrets in Granada

Truly, there aren´t. Case in point: the day I was sick, Angela Cristina apparently walked around telling anyone who would listen that "Catarina está enferma y le van a poner una inyección en las nalgas. " Which, unfortunately, translates to "Catharine is sick and they´re going to give her a shot in her butt." We´re not sure where she got the shot part from, but the fact remains that anyone who didn´t already know about my illness sure does now.

Caroline (new volunteer) and I changed our worksite today. We´re now teaching English in yet another "dangerous during the night" neighborhood. It´s still not exactly what I wanted, but I only have a week left. And anything that keeps me away from the screams of 60 preschoolers is fine by me. The kids we´re teaching are pretty ridiculous. We taught them for about an hour, played duck duck goose for half an hour, and then we all picked mamón, a local fruit, and ate it for the rest of the class. Today they ranged in age from 7 to 12, but apparently next week in the afternoon I´m going to get some older girls. I´m unprepared for this, so bring on the adventure. It will for sure keep me busy next week, which is good because Marjan is gone and I miss her terribly.

One of the girls I´ve been tutoring at the convent is going home tomorrow, and she invited me to visit her and her family on Saturday. I´m not sure if I´m going yet, but hopefully I will. And even if I don´t, the invitation itself means more to me than she probably knows. Hospitality and conversation mean so much here. I love it.

Sweet freedom

Here´s what happened at the daycare Monday: the new volunteer (Caroline) and I were getting ready to leave when Elsa and Claudia dropped the bomb that oh, by the way, the kids will be on vacation for the next week. So we don´t have to go to work, but if we do we´ll be helping them clean and organize until the kids come back next Tuesday. I think in metaphorical terms, we could call that the "final straw". I made an appointment to talk to Henry, the director of the Spanish school here, about the whole situation. When we met last night, I tried very hard to explain that we weren´t angry with the situation, just slightly unsatisfied and maybe a little frustrated. I say "tried very hard" because I think he still felt really bad about the whole thing, although he was very helpful. Weirdly, we ended up speaking in English, but since I´d been planning all day what I wanted to say in Spanish the conversation came out way more broken and awkward than I intended or expected. Anyhow, it turns out there was a huge lack of communication with the nuns, especially since the head Mother moved to Honduras 4 weeks ago without alerting the Spanish school. So, starting tomorrow, Caroline and I will be going to a different neighborhood to hopefully do English lessons/just hang out with a few teenage girls. Unfortunately, a lot of these girls will be gone on vacation as well, but I have high hopes all the same.

Part of me can´t help feeling really bratty and selfish about wanting to change all this. The daycare clearly does need help since they usually have 2 employees wrangling up to 65 kids. At the same time, though, I know that my strengths lie in working with older kids and definitely not with the younger ones. I´ve also been feeling progressively sadder and more repressed and today I realized that I feel freer than I´ve felt in weeks. Maybe I should have spoken up sooner, but the time never seemed quite right. It´s unfortunate that the situation is just now changing when I only have 7 work days left, but it´s better late than never.

In an unrelated story, there are 3 teenage boys who really like dressing in full drag and wandering the streets of Granada. I´ve seen them a couple of times now and I love watching them interact with the other locals, who have no problem letting the "ladies" know exactly what they think of their lifestyle. More power to them.